Chronicles of Courage Part I: Mercy Hospital
by Penelope B. Lane
Summary: Who is Rachel McAllister? An incredibly accomplished woman whose role in the last days of Fairfield's holdout is the stuff of legend. This is the first in a series of interviews about the pivotal characters during the Great Infestation Crisis.
1. Author's Note & Introduction

**Author's Note**

When I first proposed this idea to my bosses on the editorial board of the _Fairfield Union-Times_, the response was mixed. The idea was simple; as people were allowed to return to their homes after the declaration of safety here in the New England, why not remember the people and events leading up to this day of celebration?

The first proposed candidate was Dr. Rachel McAllister. As Chief of Staff of Mercy Hospital, she was a pivotal player in the first phase of the infection. The discovery that the disease was transmitted through biting was discovered at her hospital, and Mercy was the last evacuation center in the city of Fairfield to be overrun.

At first, the board was skeptical. "Surely the soldiers who cleared out the last pockets of infected would be a better choice," said the arts editor.

"Or the Mayor?" asked the sports editor.

But then the metro desk editor spoke. "I was at Mercy Hospital during the last hours of the evacuation. That woman saved my life, and it is the least that we the survivors can do to remember her."

So it was decided. I had a few leads and set out to track them down. Here are their stories.


	2. Dr Miles Preston

**Dr. Miles Preston**

I walked into her office, oh, probably the twelfth of October. She was staring out the window, obviously deep in thought, those piercing green eyes of hers far, far away. I was a hot-shot surgeon, you know, and she and I had a sort of butting-heads relationship. I respected her—before this whole mess, even—and she respected me, but we didn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of things.

She had just scheduled me for a surgery that I had passed off to another doctor. I was taking the weekend off to go to the city—New York—with my girlfriend Sandra. I said, "McAllister, what's up with this? Jameson can do the surgery."

At first I didn't think she heard me, but then she turned to me. "I need you to do it."

I didn't know what was so damn important, and I said the same thing. She just gave me a look, those eyes of hers were shiny. I thought she might cry. Finally, she said, "People are getting restless. I want them to know we have our best doctors working on the problem. That means you."

Okay, so she knew how to play to my ego. It's true, I was the best surgeon there. But even I wasn't ready for what I would see.

As Chief of Staff, McAllister was a doctor as well. Her specialty was diagnostics. That's why she took a special interest in this case. That and the fact that the Governor called her and told her that if the infection made it out of her hospital, he'd be sure she never worked in medicine again.

Nah. We were all scared. Even me. We'd seen small packs of them rushing through the streets, running into traffic, getting hit and then getting up again. We saw them biting other people. And then we saw the victims transforming under our care at Mercy. She wanted to know what this was, and how to stop it.

That weekend marked the start of Fairfield's panic phase. The Mayor and the city council evacuated as the military drove into town. Don't listen to any stories about Mayor Dingel holding on until the last chopper. He left in the first after his wife was bit.

I remember walking through a security checkpoint set up by some meatheads uptown. I had to flash my hospital ID three times before he finally let me through. I scrubbed up and joined McAllister in the OR. She had her black hair tied back under a doctor's cap, her face was covered by a mask. She only nodded at me.

This candidate was good for our purposes because it was infected, snapping. We had pumped it full of anesthetic. Probably we'd have gone to the Hague if we'd done to a human what we did to that zombie. But McAllister had to find out if a cure was possible, and if it wasn't, how to stop the spread. So it was pumped full of anesthetics, and that still hadn't sedated it.

It was brain surgery, pure and simple. McAllister had, with her team of diagnosticians, narrowed down the infection to something to do with the brain. If there was a way to cure the disease, it would be physical. If drugs couldn't do it; maybe a lobotomy could.

I botched it. Pure and simple. The thing wouldn't sit still; we couldn't restrain it. It bit the nurse who tried to tie down its head. I heard she killed herself the next day. But we couldn't do it. I sawed the bastard's head open, opened its skull and poked around.

The brain was in tact. There was no swelling. Nothing that indicated what the infection had damaged. We didn't know where to cut. I asked McAllister what to do. She said that we could try a regular lobotomy. I tried, but it jerked around so much that my tool went through its brain.

She was pissed, more at herself than me. She knew that we were there on a fool's errand. There was no cure—we know that now, but I think she sensed it then. We both did.

The next day, the city really went to hell. It seemed that there were more of those things in the city than there were healthy people, and the military was setting up a quarantine zone wherever they could. Schools, the parks, the Civic Arena. Mercy was the last to be commandeered by the military. They skipped the middleman with Mercy; CEDA didn't even bother.

I got my evacuation order the day after the operation. The whole nine yards—a Humvee escort to the park where I was airlifted. They needed me at the military field hospital at Metro in Newburg. That was the last time I saw Dr. McAllister.


End file.
